Search and you shall receive

Searching for parking near the ballpark on game day was well worth it to lunch with CEO Barney Pell and the rest of the Powerset crew who on Thursday invited the geek world to share some food and a demo of their natural language search engine in their sunny South of Market courtyard.

Dressed in black logoed T-shirts, the Powersetters showed off their search engine to 200 or so. The technology developed at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is called Natural Language Processing. So Lunch 2.0 founder Terrence Chay joked the noon-hour meal amounted to “Natural Lunch Processing.”

The true entrepreneurial success is Lunch 2.0, an online grassroots movement designed around the concept of getting free lunch at a smorgasbord of high-tech companies. The founders are Chay and Mark Jen of Tagged, a popular online social network, Joseph Smarr of online address organizer Plaxo and David Kellogg of Yahoo.

Terrence Chay checks out the San Francisco Chronicle’s front-page story on Lunch 2.0

Lunch 2.0 got its start in Silicon Valley but the lunch circuit has expanded. Now the guys have begun organizing well-attended events in San Francisco. The next city event is at Cnet on Aug. 24.

Niall Kennedy, a Microsoft veteran living the startup-life sharing office space with Twitter and others, says he’s pleased to see not just the Lunch 2.0 turnout, but the critical mass of Internet companies that have bubbled up South of Market.